Jaw-dropping Photos of America’s Space Program

It’s one of the great ironies of journalism that it’s a lot easier to capture close-up images of the murderous business of war than of the peaceable work of putting people and payloads in space. But the rules are as strict as they are extreme: On launch days, rockets sit at the middle of a circular evacuation zone that, in the case of the space shuttles and the old Saturn V’s, stretched up to three miles in all directions. That no-go rule has never diminished the demand for arm’s-length images of the liftoffs—and satisfying that demand has called for some creative thinking, engineering and camera-rigging on the part of the people taking the pictures.